Institutional Mechanisms for REDD+ - Case Studies Working Paper

hunting quotas set too high by the Wildlife Division and by historically poor law enforcement rather than
local community management practices. 109
Many of the experts interviewed for this study estimate that WMAs have not (or have not yet) significantly
improved local wellbeing. Overall, the money received by villages seems to be hardly sufficient to keep the
WMAs running, let alone to provide substantial benefits to communities. While in many villages the money
seems to have been well used, in others it seems to be captured by local elite (including some on the Village
Council).
Recommendations to improve downward accountability of AAs include:
� Strengthening the role of Village Assemblies in key decisions made by the AA: for instance, by making information
publically available on village notice boards and through regular Assembly meetings where the Village
Council would have to report back on activities of the AA.
� Creating WMAs composed of fewer villages, taking into account the ethnicity of villagers. At present, NGOs tend to
focus on wildlife habitat and ecology, resulting in some WMAs being unmanageable. WMAs should be
structured as socially sustainable and manageable units. Ecological scale should be achieved by
encouraging these units to cooperate with each other. To achieve this, WMAs should not be supported
or facilitated by conservation NGOs exclusively. Instead, development NGOs should be integrated into
the conversation. Africare, for example, has focused more on social and development issues in the
Tabora WMA.
� Strengthening village institutions and governance and work with villagers instead of engaging exclusively AAs and village
chairs. At present, the two primary facilitation NGOs, the AWF and WWF, are focused on infrastructure
such as AA buildings, equipment, and roads. They should spend more efforts working directly with
villages.
� Integrating wildlife management with other nature resource management at the village level by using existing natural
resources village committees when relevant, so as to keep a coherence at the village level.
� Reorganizing WMAs to be run by managers, similar to CBWM in Kenya, instead of a committee, as is
currently the case with AAs.
� Simplifying the process to create WMAs following the example of CBFM regulations (e.g., simplify Land Use
Planning requirements, withdraw pre-authorization by District of contracts with safari operators).
3.3.8 CONCLUSION: HOW ADAPTED IS THIS MODEL TO MANAGE REDD+
BENEFITS AT THE LOCAL LEVEL?
Two major lessons can be drawn from the experience of Enduimet WMA in terms of institutional design for
REDD+:
� AAs provide a link between national/District government and villages and, therefore, may respond to the
need for ―aggregate institutions‖ identified by the Tanzania government to implement REDD+.
Experiences with AAs, however, show that the scale of these aggregate institutions matters: a balance
needs to be found between the advantages of large aggregates (e.g., to keep costs down, to meet wildlife
management objectives) and the social and human factors calling for smaller aggregates (e.g.,
communication problems between large AAs and villagers, difficulties arising from ethnicallyheterogeneous
AAs).
109 Illegal hunting–particularly by urban elites and the military–has wiped out or seriously depleted many wildlife populations.
56 PRRGP INSTITUTIONAL MECHANISMS FOR REDD: CASE STUDIES – WORKING PAPER